Chronology of Coverage

Aug. 31, 2014

Aug. 27, 2014

Aug. 25, 2014

David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks is ambitious novel that offers insight into larger narrative Man Booker Prize-nominated author and cult favorite has been developing over past decade; book is first time Mitchell's rabid fans are able to piece books together into cohesive universe. MORE

Oct. 21, 2012

Oct. 14, 2012

Tom Tykwer, Lana and Andy Wachowski, directors of Cloud Atlas, confronted numerous challenges in bringing David Mitchell’s novel to the movie screen; Mitchell has written four other novels, all in development, and notes that the only book to make it to screen is, what he calls, 'the most unfilmable one.' MORE

''Would you like to see my notebook?'' the author David Mitchell asks, producing from his knapsack a slim black volume decorated with a Hello Kitty-type sticker. (He has a toddler at home.) Here, written in minuscule, exquisite print, are the raw materials of a future novel, set in 18th-century Holland: columns of mix-and-match Dutch first and last names, schematic diagrams of possible scenes, historical facts, interesting words, stray thoughts, snippets of dialogue.

It is not unheard of for a novelist of exceptional talent to write a deliberately difficult book. This urge does not necessarily result in novels with nameless characters, mutating typography or unpunctuated attempts to explore the aphotic realm of human consciousness. It is also not an urge unique to modernism or experimentalism.

David Mitchell can sometimes write like a dream. What he cannot write, however, is a decent dream sequence. And that poses a big problem for the British writer's second novel, which constantly careers off the reality highway into one surreal dead end after another.

How to describe David Mitchell's first novel, ''Ghostwritten''? You could say the book resembles a musical composition for multiple instruments whose parts converge around a single theme. You could say it blends the nonlinear techniques of movies like Quentin Tarantino's ''Pulp Fiction'' and Krzysztof Kieslowski's ''Red'' with the narrative strategies of Alex Garland's 1999 novel, ''The Tesseract.'' More simply, you could say that ''Ghostwritten'' relates the intersecting stories of a dozen people all connected to one another by six (or fewer) degrees of separation.

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June 27, 2010, Sunday

Duke’s lacrosse team endured 13 character-testing months marked by rape allegations against players and a discarded season, all for another chance to compete for a national championship. Once they finally made it to the postseason, a lengthy...